


Look at these fine children

by cosmic_kid



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-20
Updated: 2015-07-20
Packaged: 2018-04-10 08:27:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4384559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmic_kid/pseuds/cosmic_kid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the war, Andromeda asks about her sisters</p>
            </blockquote>





	Look at these fine children

After it’s finished (but not over because nothing’s ever over because that’s not the way her world works) Andromeda Tonks asks Harry Potter to tell her about her sisters.

She doesn’t need to know what her daughter looked like, drained of motion, unnatural molecular stillness settling around the most colorful heart in all the world. No, that image isn’t necessary. Andromeda builds her brittle kingdom on pleasant memories, and she doesn’t need recounted darkness to intrude. Harry Potter believes she will ask about Nymphadora, and is surprised when instead she says “tell me about Narcissa. Tell me about Bellatrix.” 

He has been forced into the body of a man, this boy. All his life he’s kept himself from growing too tall, having to fit himself into narrow corners and hidden spaces. Andromeda Tonks believes if the Dark Lord had never risen again she would have liked him very much, but now it is impossible for her to see him and produce any warmth. All of that goes to stoking the fires of the past, of the dead whom she loved. But she believes that of everyone, Harry Potter would understand this.

“Narcissa saved my life,” Harry Potter says. “She save everybody’s life. She risked her own, to make sure she could go back for Draco.” 

Draco. The boy Andromeda has never seen. 

“And Bellatrix?”

Harry Potter shifts uncomfortably, and Andromeda sees in him the raging whorl of hate, of anger. You think that ends when you win but it doesn’t. Nothing ever ends. Harry Potter never had much in his life, and what he had was cruelly taken from him time and again. Bellatrix did some of that taking, Andromeda knows; above all, this boy’s godfather, Andromeda’s handsome laughing cousin who she spent years mourning and cursing and who now is just another on a long list of names carved in stone.

“She was killed.” He doesn’t say by whom. He doesn’t trust her. She doesn’t blame him.

“She would have done it to herself, had she saw him die, had she realized it was over,” Andromeda says, and she knows Harry Potter is expecting her to be cold and angry, to rage perhaps, but she has done her raging. She only has room left to mourn Bellatrix now. Andromeda has become skilled at mourning.

“But it’s done now,” Harry Potter says, and Andromeda does not think he is trying to comfort her. Not this boy. 

From somewhere she pulls the strength to smile at him, sitting in front of her a broken thing finding victory erases none of the scars, takes away none of the loss. Her husband would have loved Harry Potter. Her daughter did love him. And Andromeda Tonks doesn’t have the strength left within her to give him what he needs. She has her own small child now to raise. 

“Thank you,” she tells him. He understands a dismissal when he hears one.

_  
The boy comes to see her. The boy she has never seen.

He looks like his father, which Andromeda finds distasteful. Lucius is all angles, hard and pinched like his bones are too large and sharp for his skin. Andromeda never got to ask Narcissa if she truly loved Lucius or if it was just the Slytherin sort of love where you realize your heart has very little to do with any of it. He sends an owl ahead so she is expecting him. Teddy is sleeping- such an agreeable infant, nothing at all like his mother and yet there are times Andromeda finds herself watching him from the corner of her eye, waiting for…for something. Waiting for a monster, although every time this thought flares unbidden she chokes it down hard. We cannot help to whom we are born. 

Anyway. The boy.

Maybe a man now, she doesn’t know. He introduces himself with Narcissa’s grace, but he speaks with Lucius’ drawl. Maybe Andromeda should have told him not to come. She does not want anything to do with Lucius, no matter his last-minute conversion. Lucius was there when Bellatrix killed Sirius and Lucius would have gladly killed children had it suited him. Lucius is a fool, a conniving slippery fool who in the end stood for nothing. Andromeda has no pity for him. 

“Thank you for seeing me,” says Draco.

“Yes, well, you are family. How is your mother?”

“She’s doing well. She wanted…” he pauses, flinches a bit. There was a noise outside, some muggle vehicle backfiring, a raised voice, Andromeda doesn’t know and she recalls that this boy lived with the Dark Lord for months, lived right beneath his horrible gaze. Draco clears his throat. “She wanted me to ask you if you needed anything. Anything at all. She sent me so as…not to upset you.”

Oh Narcissa, Andromeda thinks. You were always terrified of the direct approach. Bellatrix used to frighten you so, didn’t she, with her rages, her candor? Have any of us changed at all? 

“That’s very kind of her, Draco, but Teddy and I are doing quite well, thank you.” 

He looks at a loss now, his hands twitching in his lap. Andromeda is reminded forcefully of Harry Potter when she looks at Draco, how both boys were forced into narrow spaces, how both boys were drawn into pale, frightened men against their will. There will be sleepless nights for both of them, anger with no good direction, waking nightmares, moments when the real world around them melts away and tosses them back to that battlefield they will never truly leave. And Andromeda finds a dark and bitter envy birthing inside of her- if she had seen it all, if she had fought, if she had found herself scarred, would it make it easier to bear her losses? She doesn’t know. She has stopped trying to make sense of all the broken things that curl up and dig their claws into her heart.

“Would you like some tea?” Andromeda asks her nephew.

He looks up and for a moment, as the late-afternoon sun slants across his face and drains his eyes of color and stains his skin gold he reminds her strongly of Narcissa when she was young- wide-eyed and eager. Desperate for someone to tell her everything would be fine now, everything would be quiet and fine.

_

Teddy has blonde hair sometimes, almost white, like ice and other times it so deep black all light is lost in it. When this happens Andromeda makes sure he has the toy broomstick Harry sent him; it excites him so much his hair will turn pink or orange or blue and then she can look at him again without seeing anyone else.

_

Regulus. Sirius. Bellatrix. Narcissa. Andromeda. 

Look at these finely-built children, look what centuries of purity has created: sisters as fine as paintings, sisters like three lovely nymphs and brothers that will grow into handsome men, brothers with white smiles and hair as dark as the sky that holds their guiding stars. Look at these children, the whole of the future spread out for them! What fine marriages they will make, what beautiful children they will produce in turn, how the blood will continue on as ever, as it ever has, what find wizarding children! 

Now they are bones and mist and ash and memory. Now they wake up with mouths shaped for screams. Now they are either dead or clinging on with brittle bleeding fingernails. How fine. How fine.

_

Narcissa sends Andromeda an owl, thanking her for taking such good care of Draco. She is worried about him. He is not recovering from all he experienced. And hidden in the words are questions Narcissa will never ask aloud, will never ask through ink: are you recovering, Andromeda? Is anyone worried about you? 

Andromeda responds graciously, just as her upbringing has taught her. The house is messier now than when she was a wife and mother. She is still those things, isn’t she? If Narcissa can be, then Andromeda can be too, right? Andromeda made all the right choices and it is her here, her throat scratched raw with grief and pain. I am all those same things, Narcissa, and I do not need your sympathy, not now, not now, not now!

_

Harry takes Teddy out for the afternoon. Draco comes by and Andromeda is calmer now, much calmer, almost herself. There are some moments when what she was pours through and she can see a faint image of herself, years and years from now, smiling as often as she used to. It’s not much, but hope’s never been much anyway. It’s something.

“Mother would like to see you, if you wish it,” Draco says, sipping his tea.

Andromeda thinks she will never untangle all the ways she hurt and was hurt, all the ways that everything they were came back around to destroy them. This war they have all lost came from other, older wars, and all of those wars were stamped with family names and crests. Could they have done anything but fallen apart? Could they have experienced anything but loss in the end? Could someone like Sirius, like Regulus, like Bellatrix ever survived? Could someone like Andromeda, like Narcissa ever have remained whole? Blood required blood, and payment was due. Andromeda feels like she is hundreds of years old, like she has lived so many lifetimes none of them make sense anymore. But here she is with her long-lost nephew and her giggly grandchild and all the broken children devoted to him and a star can blaze into death then take a millennia to die- isn’t that what the Muggles say?

“Yes, I think that can be arranged,” Andromeda says.

Draco smiles. When he smiles, he looks like Narcissa. 

Don’t let this choke you, Andromeda thinks. Don’t let another generation fall apart.

And maybe that’s the only reason Andromeda agrees to see her sister. So it will not continue again and again and again until no one is left.

_

A knock on the door. Teddy on Andromeda’s lap, half asleep, his hair bright yellow, like springtime. Andromeda calls for the knocker to enter and the door opens with just the barest squeak and a woman with long blonde hair stands in the doorway, the sun pouring in behind her so she looks like something made of light and nothing else.

“Andromeda,” she says. 

Andromeda closes her eyes. Takes a breath.

Look at these fine children. Look at these battle-scarred children. Look at these little princes and princesses. Look at these burnt-out soldiers.

Never again.

“Narcissa,” Andromeda Tonks says, and her sister steps inside and closes the door behind her.


End file.
